As human societies evolved, the efficiencies of division of labor and specialization led to increasingly sophisticated markets and exchange of broader varieties and quantities of goods and services as well as markedly more complex financial tools and products. Barter developed and gradually more general trade systems involving representative or intermediate exchange media evolved. For example, in trade between countries using “soft” currency, such as the former Soviet Union, East Germany and other Eastern block nations, and those of much of the rest of the globe, including Western Europe, a guarantor was often needed to provide “hard” currency backing for the goods, in a process known as avalizing. As a result, not only the balance between demand and supply of goods, but also currency fluctuation rates, as well as geopolitical- and time-varying interest rates, as many other factors generally captured by the terminology “market inefficiencies”, entered into determination of a final sales price for the items when they were sold to individual consumers.
Other types of goods also traverse lengthy, and sometimes extremely convoluted, chains of events in a series of locations throughout the world as they are manufactured, distributed etc. Mines in one area provide ores that are shipped to, and then refined in, another area, to provide raw materials. These are then shipped to yet another area for transformation into intermediate products. Those, in turn, are transported to appropriate facilities, where they are further combined with additional intermediate products etc. until a final consumer good or other manufactured item is realized. Such product then enters into a market in yet a still different area. To some extent, this reflects differences in regulatory bodies or prevailing wages. For example, factories known as “maquiladores” line the northern border of Mexico. In these factories, workers perform processes, such as cyanide-based electroplating, that are no longer economically feasible in the United States, due, at least in part, to prevailing wage and regulatory issues.
One facet of planning such diverse production and marketing operations that is a formidable challenge involves determination of appropriate schedules to coordinate fabrication, develop supply lines and achieve a balance so that supply and sales price provide an agreeable confluence satisfactory to sustain production and also consistent with social harmony and a stable economy. In past, this has been addressed primarily via approaches that, in turn, and in combination with other events, have occasionally led to a broad variety of economic disasters of completely phenomenal proportions.
Post-World-War-I Germany is one example of such a catastrophy. Workers were paid twice a day and encouraged to immediately purchase food because inflation was so high that the currency would be worthless otherwise—and large amounts of bank notes were required simply to purchase a loaf of bread. A different type of economic imbalance is seen by examples such as the Brazilian economy in the 1960s, which supported a rate of inflation of over 1,000 per cent per year. The stock market crash of 1929 is another example of a different manifestation of failure to achieve satisfactory span of regulatory control over economic events as they unfolded.
However, even in the absence of such grotesque interruptions or circumstances, the desirability of being able to predict a successful sales price and sales volume for a good or service, or to allocate a gamut of resources of any type, efficiently and across a varying spectrum of demand, has led to much research and lucubration, but in general, has failed to provide satisfactory tools that are robust enough to provide broad generality of effective asset allocation or economic modeling.
A surprisingly rich range of allocation issues might well be responsive to such a tool if one could in fact be developed. A completely different example of resource allocation and planning is observable with telephone services. When a natural disaster such as an earthquake or a volcanic eruption occurs, demand for telephone services experiences an avulsion of titanic proportions. As a result, the entire system fails. Efficient, effective and reliable electrical power distribution is yet another infrastructural resource allocation problem that has recently enjoyed attention in international news. Other types of examples include memory management in computer systems, managing bandwidth and messaging resource allocation for transmission of data bundles of greatly varying size and the like.
Problems in planning range from infrastructural management and development to crop planting, mining, labor supply and other topics might well all be more effectively addressed if a robust, general purpose tool for asset evaluation and allocation could be developed that is consistent with the Arrow-Debrue theorem. Such a tool also provides benefits in other types of asset allocation tasks.
Several centuries of study of such issues, initially under the rubric of moral philosophy, and more recently traveling under the name “economics”, has provided numerous insights, tools, modeling methodologies and theories. However, much like the search for the vaunted unified field theory, or a broadly-applicable cure for cancer, development of a robust, general purpose tool for addressing issues of supply and demand in a meaningful and quantifiable fashion has proven elusive, subtle, uninformative and frustrating. At the same time, the world population is increasing, and demand also has increased for a progressively wider collection of technologies, goods and services. A market equilibrium price is a maximum price at which a product can be sold. A fundamental theorem, proven by Arrow and Debrue in 1954, shows that market equilibrium prices always exist under a very general scenario. This proof, however, is not constructive, i.e., it has not heretofore been possible to convert that proof into an efficient algorithm. A large corporation having a gamut of products, and an expectation of increasing both the gamut and their market, could benefit greatly from an automation tool for establishing market equilibrium prices for their products.
There are thus needs that have increased over those of prior decades, and that will continue to increase, for processes and apparatus for efficiently apportioning an ever-growing gamut of raw materials, manufactured goods and other commodities across a market or exchange arena comprising an ever-increasing spectrum of more and more consumers, whilst maintaining harmony.